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Sunday, March 10, 2013

How to make Wonton

Northern
Chinese people like dumplings, while southern Chinese like Wonton. In China wonton have a lot of different names and different ways to wrap them. In addition, there are small and large wonton in Shanghai: in small ones the filling is just ground pork or a fancy one is shrimp. We eat
them as breakfast. When I was a child in the market I remember old ladies would wrap these small wonton on
site just using one hand (you don't see this much anymore). I occasionally bought 50g to take home and cook for a fancy breakfast. The filling for large wontons can vary, but it usually is ground pork with all kinds of vegetables. It’s good for a weekend
lunch, especially on a cold day.

Unlike northern people who make the dumpling dough
by themselves, we just used store-bought wonton wrappers. We only needed to prepare the
filling. The way I describe is what my parents always did when I was a kid. This is how I learned to wrap them.

prepared
filling

wonton
wrapper

Using
a finger, dip some water and wet the edge of wonton wrapper so you can seal it
later. Put some filling in the middle of the wonton wrapper, for homemade
wonton you always put a lot of filling,not like the skinny store-bought ones.

Fold
the bottom edge up to the top edge and seal it. Then with two hands move
the left and right corners to overlap together and seal those.

Make
the shape like"Yuan bao" [an ancient Chinese ingot currency], or a
nurse's hat,so they can stand up. Every wonton when puffed up is so cute.

Vegetable
and meat wonton

yield:
50(serve 3-4 )

Ingredients:

for
pork：

300g ground
pork

2 stalk green
onion chopped

1/2
tsp salt

1/2tspsugar

1/2 tsp ginger
powder

1/4 tsp white
pepper

1tsp cooking
wine

Stir
ground pork and other ingredients only in one direction until it becomes
sticky

for
vegetable：

150g cabbage
or bok choy

50g
mushroom
chopped

Chop
finely add 1tsp salt, let sit for a while then squeeze the liquid out of it.
and add to the pork mixture and mushroom mix well. that's the fillings.

wrap
the wonton as described above

for
soup:

chicken
or vegetable stock

1
egg（fried then
sliced)

dash
dried small shrimps

dash seaweed

dash
sesame oil

dash
white pepper

Boil
the water then add the wonton cook to 3-5 mins or until the wonton
float.

add
the cooked wonton to the hot soup stock and add other ingredients. serve
immediately.